There are numerous options for blocking out heat and light and retaining heat in your van when you’re out in the wild. Our current solution is the thermal window blind variety with the suckers you have to lick and stick to the window.

The issue I have with them is they are a ball ache to get out and stick up. Especially if you are just crashing in the van because you got drunk or you are doing a spot of wild camping, ours fall down a lot too.

I’ve been looking at the Van-X curtains for a while and if you believe the hype then the hype says they are the best van curtains on the market.

After our trip to France and a few other spontaneous nights away I’d managed to convince Lolly that curtains in the rear and tailgate was the way forward, she agreed so I cracked on and ordered a set of the premium line T4 tailgate and side window curtains. I ordered on the Friday and they arrived on the Monday.

Christmas happened and then I got a chance to fit them.

Each curtain comes in its own box with its own fittings. I started with the window above the cooker and sink.

Here’s what it looked like before.

You have to look up the instructions online, they are pretty straight forward, these things come in handy.

As different vans have different size windows you’ll need to cut the rails to fit yours which is no real drama.

The thing I found the most difficult was getting the supplied self tapping screws into the body work, I broke two drill bits I was using as pilots but persevered and got there in the end. I also found the curtain stops that plug into the  end of the rail a pain to get in, I pushed both curtains on and left the the last screw out so I could bend the rail a bit to get the stopper in as shown below.

Once the stopper was back in I put the last screw in and pulled the second curtain back to where it should be.

The curtains also totally block out any light.

The curtains also come with a tie back, I didn’t put them in as I don’t think I need them plus the light was fading and I still had two curtains to go, this one took me an hour.

The next curtain went up fairly quick, when you do the sliding door curtain you need to pay attention to the rail.

As you can see, one channel is wider than the other, on the previous window you fix the rail with the wider channel toward the window, in this instance you fit the wider channel away from the window, you do this so you can cut a bit out for the sliding door lock.

This means the curtain can be pulled without fouling on the lock.

This one took about 40 minutes to do, a bit quicker than the last one.

The tailgate curtain has one regular rail and one that doesn’t look like any of the others, the regular rail goes at the top of the tailgate and other one goes just below the window and fixes to the wooden panel, took about half an hour to install.

I’m very happy with the way they have turned out. If I can put these in anyone can!

We tested them out a couple of days after, we went over to friends and stayed on their drive after a few beers.

The curtains lived up to the hype, they kept the cold out, the warmth in and blocked out any external light, as you can see we still have the thermal curtains in the front, more to block the light out than anything, maybe a van X cab divider curtain is the answer!

Anyways, from my experience I would gladly recommend these curtains, well priced, well made and well awesome!